MLK Day is time when community comes together

Published 4:17 pm, Sunday, January 18, 2015

Midlanders hold up candles during a vigil Monday night to honor the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tyler White/Reporter-Telegram

Midlanders hold up candles during a vigil Monday night to honor the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tyler White/Reporter-Telegram

Photo: Tyler White

MLK Day is time when community comes together

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Tall City residents are invited to come together today for the MLK Day of Service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.

Featuring speakers, the annual march and a town hall discussion with the Midland Police Department, the events will focus on Midland working together to make the community a better, safer place.

“For those of us who have been preparing for it, we’ve been working on it for months, so when the day comes, we’re just there to make sure that we’re having a day on and not a day off,” said Robbyne Fuller, CEO of Midland African American Roots Historical Cultural Arts Council. “We want to emphasize to everybody that it’s important that the community come together, not just the African-American community, but the entire community to come together and have a day of working to make our community better, because only that way can we have a good community to live in and be aware of what the needs of the community are.”

New among this year’s events is the “Making Midland Better Together” town hall meeting with the MPD.

“Basically, what we want to do with that is we want Midland to talk about some of what they see out there,” said Morris Williams, director of the nonprofit Making an Impact. “We want to be better as a community in assisting the police. We can always fuss at the police, but what can we do as a community so that we can work with them to make our community safer?”

Williams, whose nonprofit helped to facilitate the town hall meeting with the MPD, said that it is important to remember that King’s work and the civil rights movement should not just be “looked at as a black movement, an African-American movement,” but that it was for all Americans.

“Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of the people, of all people,” Williams said. “Simply put, he wanted to level the playing field and allow everybody to have a voice (and) I think that it’s most significant now because I truly believe that in most aspects we all have a voice, but we don’t value it like they would have back in his day. I think it’s significant for people to know the history (of) what people went through for us to have a voice. And if we know that, then we will value our voice more.